


Even a Cat-Deer Can Look At A King

by saavik13



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, War, slight AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:47:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5141957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saavik13/pseuds/saavik13
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the end of the war approaches Katara faces returning to the life she left behind at the South Pole and Zuko contemplates the cost of the last 100 years on the people of all the nations.  They've both seen, done, and endured more than anyone their age should and some things cannot be forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from an old Irish Proverb regarding equality. (Adapted for Avatar of course.)
> 
> Sorry for the Bato bashing, but he seemed the best candidate for this plot and someone had to be sacrificed.

Zuko knew that Katara wasn’t like Fire Nation girls. He’d known it the moment he’d first met her, when they were enemies and he’d underestimated her and she him. He’d had plenty of girls offering themselves to him before his exile, even more after as if somehow the disgraced crown prince was even more exiting than the one in good standing. His reputation as a ‘bad boy’ as his uncle called it seemed to make him even more attractive to a certain kind of girl. He’d learned early on to turn the majority away – that the brief flare of pleasure wouldn’t be worth the drama later. But he was fairly accustomed to the interest and attention that would fall on him once people knew his identity.

Katara, however, had never shown a hint of interest let alone attraction. 

In his travels he’d heard that Fire Nation girls were more sensual, more open to sex than the other nations – that they had sex drives others lacked. He’s pretty sure that’s a myth, probably to do with the difference in climate and clothing. Some of it’s cultural, he’s recognized that, but he thinks it’s more to do with the fact that in his nation girls, at least peasant girls, don’t have to hide their desires. Fire Nation girls understand that what they have is a commodity, and they don’t trade in it lightly. There are social programs in place to encourage women to have as many children as possible, to feed the army and the war hungry machine his father has built, so there’s less stigma, less chance of a ruined life. If a Fire Nation girl gets pregnant she’s nothing to fear. Her family will not disown her and if they did there’s plenty of government programs and housing and she and her baby won’t starve. A woman with more than five children is honored as a true patriot – many strive for that status and the generous stipend that goes with it.

The Earth Kingdom has no programs, no incentives. In fact, having several children there can be a death sentence. His father taxes the lands in his holding so heavily that no one can afford extra mouths to feed. Life can be hard there and women can’t afford the risks. Daughters are taught to avoid or delay childbearing, and anything leading up to it. There’s a fear attached to the act that makes it a hidden thing, a shameful thing, and Zuko hates that. It’s fairly new this attitude. Before his grandfather and the start of the Fire Nation occupation Earth Kingdom writings and art show a different way, a different attitude. 

The people of the Earth Kingdom have always been more reserved, more conservative, than the Fire Nation; that is true, but they used to always have large families to help work the land, embracing a more natural and healthy view of sexuality and all it entails. He heard his uncle once while they were on the run, talking with an old woman in a village, and they were lamenting the changes they saw. “It’s necessary,” the old woman had said, “my daughter and my granddaughters must do what they can to survive and too many babies is a sure path to poverty and starvation.” She’d said it to explain why her granddaughters weren’t married, why she was distrustful of strangers, why there were so few children playing in the commons. It doesn’t help that he knows Fire Nation solders do not always ask permission and of the handful of children he saw that day far too many had the eyes of his people and not the green of their mothers’.

The brothels his men used to frequent, along the waterways in the Earth Kingdom, were horrible miserable places. Dark and musty rooms with women and men with dead eyes – some mere children younger than him. Zuko has never done more than walk through one with his uncle, so he could see the truth of it, and he never wants to. The people there have no choice, no hope, and it sickens him. He saw a boy once who told him his family couldn’t feed him anymore so they sold him to the brothel. His price would mean his family could make it through the winter. He was proud he could help them but the weight of disease was already in his tiny frame and Zuko doubted the boy would live to see that winter. 

The Fire Nation solders carried more than weapons with them into the Earth Kingdom. Venereal disease was a consequence of war, his uncle told him. It attacks the solders as well as the concurred and it is nature’s equalizer. Zuko just thinks it’s a curse on humanity for their sins against one another. While Uncle tried to keep his men in line, away from the local women and children, Zuko knows the other generals turned a blind eye or even encouraged the most vile behaviors. He was only a small boy when he’d heard one of them laughingly say that if they didn’t kill all the Earth Kingdom people they’d breed them to extinction at the rate they were going. After traveling the Earth Kingdom Zuko knows now what that look likes. He’s seen more broken women, haunted families, and red eyed children dressed in green than he’d imagined possible.

He can’t help but wonder what his people’s war has done to the Water Tribes. The north he suspects hasn’t changed all that much. The war has isolated them more but they have remained for the most part above and apart from it. The south, however, he wonders.

Katara seems both naive and oddly aware. She’s younger than Zuko and if she’d been Fire Nation or Earth kingdom he’d have expected her to be untouched. She’s only 14, maybe 15, and while he’d been that age when he’d first lay with another he was also the crown prince and allowed more liberties than most families would have granted to a child. It feels like so long ago now, and it’s only been three years, but he’s lived lifetimes in those years and when he looks at her he wishes she didn’t have the same weight in her eyes. War has made her grow up faster than she should have. Responsibility and regret mingle in her eyes and when she looks at Aang it’s like a twisted parody of a mother. Zuko knows the airbender is in love with her, and he knows she wants to be in love with him back, but there’ something in her that’s broken, bent out of shape, and she just cannot return it the same way. Staying in the temple with them he can see it so clearly, and even though he’s resolved himself to not start caring about these people, he can’t afford to not with the insane plan they are all concocting to take down his father, he can’t help but feel for her. 

It’s Sokka that finally puts words to the mystery.

“Bato did her a disservice.” The young water tribesman had said softly, under his breath one evening. Katara had spent the day mother hening everyone in the camp, overseeing the laundry and the food storage and generally performing all the necessities, or delegating them as she could, so that the rag tag group wouldn’t starve or get ill. She’d been exhausted, and depressed, and while the others laughed and joked, while some of the boys tried to get her attention, she floated through the group more like a ghost than a 15 year old girl. 

“What do you mean?” Zuko had asked.

Sokka had sighed. “When we were little, and the men were going off to war, they… they made the decision that they couldn’t leave anything behind that it was worth the Fire Nation taking.” He’d looked up, his blue eyes sad. “So father asked Bato to make sure she wasn’t worth taking. It happened all through the village, fathers asking others to do what they could not. If he lives and returns to the village, Katara belongs to Bato and he has not let her forget that. She’s a water master, Zuko. She’s the teacher to the avatar and she’s washing everyone’s underwear. Part of her, I think part of her believes that’s all she’s good for. After everything she’s accomplished when she gets like this, she sees a future where she’s tied to a hearth forever taking care of people. I know she wants more, she’s worth more, and most of the time she remembers that. But every now and then something dark comes over her and she thinks only about what will happen when she has to return to our village and the life she left behind.”

Zuko cannot imagine asking another man to violate his own child just so if an army ever came they could not take her innocence. And Zuko knows it was a useless thing – the armies of the Fire Nation didn’t care if a woman was untouched or not, if they wanted her they’d have taken her. It does tell him that purity must be important to her people, and he wonders what it does to her to know she’s been claimed in such a manner. Bato, he gathers, was her father’s friend – a man twice her age. And now she belongs to him. She’s belonged to him since she was too young to even really comprehend what that means. As the war nears an end, whatever end that might be, Katara knows that it also means an end to her freedom. If they win, she will be expected to return to her village and to this Bato, to a life of babies and housework and drudgery. If they lose, she will either be dead or in prison. 

Aang tells him later that when they met this Bato, he didn’t like him. He thought he was all smiles on the surface but under it he watched Katara with a predators eyes. He was nothing but pleasant to Aang and Sokka, never said anything, but Aang could tell there was something off between him and Katara. As they’d planned for the first invasion he’d found their interactions even more odd and while he knew Katara had wanted to watch over his recovery it still struck him as unusual, as if she’d been hiding from Bato, when she’d slept in his room on a pile of furs next to the bed. 

Zuko doesn’t tell him why.

He wonders if she’d had to suffer Bato again, in those days they spent on the beach and in his tent, and in the weeks on the boat. If their fierce and skilled warrior had to lay back and allow this man to do as he pleased with her – her face turned away and her bending held in careful check despite her desire to fight. Zuko has seen it too many times over the years, too many women forced into such a relationship and his blood boils at the thought. He can still hear the fear in his mother’s voice whenever his father would order her to attend him– her dread and her acceptance and her despair. 

Azula will never have to face such a marriage, such a bargain, not now. But he knows many of her friends have already – given over for a day or a night or a lifetime to whomever the family thinks will bring them more power. While the peasant girls of the Fire Nation can do as they please, the women of the court have separate rules, a different game to play. And he knows that his father has threatened Azula with a political marriage more than once, whenever she got a little too independent. After all, before Zuko’s banishment and defection he was the one that stood to inherit the crown, and she was just a spare heir, something to bargain with and use for the betterment of the Nation. While everyone loved her and respected her bending, there had never been a female Fire Lord, inheritance always going to the male first even if the birth order was different. She’d grown up knowing that the only way she could stay free, stay in control, was if she somehow broke the rules. 

He suspects that his father may have done worse than threaten Azula, behind the closed doors of the royal suite, and perhaps that is why she is the way she is. After their mother left he’d spent all his time with Azula, often alone, and there had been whispers. Uncle had tried to interfere, but Azula had never confirmed his softly asked suspicions and the court couldn’t have done anything even if she had. 

In the Earth Kingdom such a thing never happens, at least not that he’s seen. Zuko had thought it the dirty secret of his own nation. Now he wonders if the Water Tribe shares a version of it. Maybe they all share it – and it’s just as big a hidden thing there as it is in the Fire Nation and he’s been too naive to see. Children forced into marriages, into beds they don’t belong in, powerless to do anything about it, unable to say no. When he’s Fire Lord he will make laws against such things, he will punish the men that do it, but for now all he can do is ache for them.

Aang doesn’t know Katara is already given to another. Zuko doubts she’ll ever tell him. And he knows that even this Bato would not challenge the Avatar over a woman. He’s already a wife, Sokka whispers. Katara would be a reluctant part of the household – a concubine in the Fire Nation tongue. Sokka hopes she stays with Aang, that the avatar will want her when he’s grown, so she can be a first wife. With so few men left in the south it is not uncommon for one man to have several wives – but it is never good to be less than first, always bad to be the youngest. If Aang asks for her, the Tribe will of course ‘forget’ about Bato’s claim. Sokka whispers that he’s hoping to have enough money after the war to buy her freedom if that doesn’t happen. The idea of buying a sister free of an unwanted marriage… Zuko grinds his teeth at the thought.

Zuko watches her preparing their dinner and thinks about all the camp girls that followed the troops – how they’d cook and clean and mend in the daylight and be used and taken and tossed away in the night. 

His uncle tried to limit such things but an army has needs, Iroh said. And if the needs are not met one way the men will meet them another. It is better to have the girls that volunteer for it, that get paid and compensated for it, than to let the army satiate its lust on the hapless. 

Katara is a warrior, a member of their team, she is not a camp girl. 

She just holds her head down like one sometimes.

It usually happens when they are in public and someone looks at her with appreciation. Or when one of the rag tag group living in the temple flirts with her. She’s a beautiful girl. It happens often.

He can’t help but wonder if she knows it doesn’t have to be that way. If this Bato ever took time to show her it wasn’t only about him. He doubts it – she doesn’t seem to know her own body like a girl that has that knowledge. 

He thinks about Mae and her easy comfort with herself. She’s been with many men, handed around the palace as a way to gain her father favor. She choose Zuko on her own because she knew he’d give her pleasure before taking his and she knew he would never hurt her – and when he was in favor her father left her alone hoping she’d bare a royal heir or even better be selected as the next Fire Lady. But Zuko knows that Mae is just as broken as Azula but in a different way if by the same hand - there’s a 10 inch scar on her thigh from a night with his father. What she did for him at Fire Rock, it wasn’t out of love. They have been friends long enough, lovers enough, he knows what Mae wants. She wants to be left alone, and that will only happen if Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Azula may consider her an ally, may offer some protection, but at the end of the day Azula would let her family use her, trade her, marry her off in any way they wanted so long as Azula benefited from it. Mae knows that Zuko hates that kind of thing, so she’s placed her loyalties with the one person that might, just might, be able to give her her freedom.

Zuko has learned patience during his long exile. His uncle taught him over long teas and longer stories and while Zuko was not a good student he’s discovered now in the long nights by their fire that the lessons he thought had passed over him were retained for when he would need them.

He watches. He watches Toph struggle with daily tasks the others take for granted but never ask for help. He watches Aang and his sadness that he so carefully hides. He watches Sokka practice tirelessly with his sword, determined to never hold the benders back in battle. And he watches Katara hid herself from all of them.

She never takes her wrappings off unless it’s to go undercover. Even then he suspects her skirts hide an extra layer that a Fire Nation woman would not have. He knows she’s hot in her swathes of extra fabric but she keeps them on never the less. She relaxes some as she gets used to his presence but not enough – and that alone tells him that whatever Bato did it still haunts her. He’s been very careful around her, always respectful of her physical space, especially when they went off together alone. He knows the kind of rumors that are about regarding Fire Nation solders and he doesn’t ever want her to think he’s like that. Still though, if he’s too quiet and startles her accidently she looks afraid.

Aang is a child. Sokka is her brother. But Zuko and the other men and boys that come and go from the group they are dangerous.

It isn’t until they are searching for her mother’s killer that he really sees. She’s angery and frightened and she watched her mother die. He suspects she watched more than her death but he’ll never ask.

If it had been him he’d have killed the bastard, pathetic as he was. But Katara is better than that, better than him, and blood bender or not he thinks she might be the best of any of them. Perhaps even better than Aang in her way.


	2. Chapter 2

The halls of the palace were empty and echoing. Zuko would give anything to be back on the road with his uncle, the irony of which was not at all lost on him. The war was over, they’d won, he was to be crowned Fire Lord – and he no longer wanted any of it. At least not for himself. 

There were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, of reasons for him to take the mantle on and a great number of them were gathering in the streets of the capital city. Not all of them were happy about the circumstances, certainly. Zuko wasn’t an idiot. There would be rebellions and coups and assignation attempts from all sides for a great long while. Those loyal to his father, and to the idea of conquest and colonization, were not at all pleased with the idea that the Fire Nation was withdrawing completely from Earth Kingdom lands. But what choice did they have? If not for Ozai’s last actions during the comet, burning so much of the coast, they might have negotiated a way for the larger colonies at least to stay where they were with a possible progression towards ceding control to the Earth Kingdom. But now, now there was no way that could happen.

They were lucky the Earth Kingdom was even considering Aang and Katara’s proposal to build a new independent city on the burnt out land- a place independent of the struggles of each nation that could act as a center for diplomacy and trade, it was revolutionary. It would take a lifetime to build it – if it could be built at all. It would stand as the legacy for the youngest Avatar in history. But no matter what it would come too late for the thousands of displaced Fire Nation colonists that were now lining up on the shores to be deported back to a place many of them had only known in stories. 

The entire economy and social structure of the Fire Nation had been altered over the last 100 years towards a single goal of expansion and colonization. Their resources were expended, their wealth distributed, their people unaccustomed to any other way of life. They’d been taxing the Earth Kingdom for food for generations and now they’d have to buy those imports – assuming the Earth Kingdom would even sell them. There were demands for war reparations coming from every corner of the globe and while the royal treasury was full it wouldn’t last long without money flowing back into it. The army would have to be paid and reduced, compensation given to those now jobless because of it. Retirement and injury benefits would have to be maintained or the entire social structure would disintegrate. Housing for the displaced colonists would have to be built and quickly. Schools had to stay open and expand, hospitals, people would still need food and shelter and none of that would be coming from the Earth Kingdom now. The Fire Nation would have to learn to stand alone, as it had not since the start of the 100 year war, and Zuko did not like their prospects. They could not afford to send a single cent out in reparations.

He’d thought Katara would be the first to challenge him on his refusal. He was surprised to find her agreeing. As the Northern and Southern Water Tribes discussed their demands she’d argued passionately that they had to look at the Fire Nation, look at the situation from all sides, before they demanded something that was not possible. If the Water Tribes have suffered, she argued, the Fire Nation had been devastated by the war. They had nearly no tradesmen anymore, everyone working for the army and all their domestic goods had been stolen or taxed from the Earth Kingdom. They would need to train people on the basics of farming again, of carpentry. The first winter, she argued, would bring mass hunger and deprivation if swift action wasn’t taken.

Of course nobody listened to her but Zuko appreciated her efforts.

They still had a few months of the growing season left and for now the best he could do was put the army to work tilling the land and planting some of the basic crops that could potentially be grown and harvested in the short time left. It was mostly nettle and winter wheat at this point, but at least if they got that in, assuming they could clear enough land that had gone to fallow for a generation or more, they could keep from having to import everything – he’d take every pound of flour as a victory. His generals were not at all happy about their new assignment, or the handful of older farmers that Zuko had put in charge of the project, but if they wanted their paychecks they’d do as they were told. 

 

Mai and Ty Lee were free from their prison sentences and both were proving invaluable. Mai had the experience with the court he needed and was doing what she could to move his mandates along. Without the threat of force his father had used it was proving more difficult to bring some of the old families in line, but Mai had the touch for it. Ty Lee on the other hand, she had strange organizational abilities only a child from a large family could acquire and was patiently slugging through the massive mountain of refugee and asylum claims coming in. Finding homes for all the displaced colonists was daunting. Aang’s offer of taking in refuges at the abandoned air temples was sweet but not at all practical. They were temples not cities, their locations were inaccessible, and the infrastructure had been abandoned for a century. 

Toph was quite happy to help out with the building projects that did meet everyone’s approval and was overseeing the construction of several new multistory housing blocks all along the costal area nearest to the Earth Kingdom. The conditions would be cramped but at least no one would have to go through the winter months without four walls and a roof. It was all very utilitarian and very industrial feeling but it would have to do. A desalination plant was in the works thanks to Sokka but it would take at least six months to begin operations and that was a highly ambitious goal. Until then, Katara and Aang’s diversion of several rivers into small aquifers would have to do. There wouldn’t be enough to plumb all the buildings and Zuko hoped that everyone adhered to the strict sanitation code he was putting in place. If not, disease would be present in short order. 

He’d put Katara in charge of setting up relief shelters and supply chains throughout both the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom. The Water Tribes, they both agreed, could fend for themselves. The North was nearly intact still and they could and were sending help to their sister tribe. But the Earth and Fire Nations were both devastated by the last days of the war and it would take years to rebuild all the damage. While the physical damage of the Earth Kingdom was obvious it was the hidden damages to his own nation that had Zuko more concerned. 

They were short on men. Dangerously short. All the Nations were, of course, but for nearly a hundred years every male in the Fire Nation had been forced into military service for at least five years. If they survived that and returned home many were too injured to work. In the last ten or so years even women had been asked to serve their own terms, although they had a choice of doing so in the military or in other branches of civil service. This coupled with the birth incentive programs meant the Fire Nation was a nation of children and mothers and cripples and solders and very little else.

How was he going to keep them gong?


End file.
